A favorite guessing game for the last year concerned Hillary Rodham Clinton. Is she a true Obama loyalist, or is she a double agent, pretending to be a team player while plotting a 2012 challenge?

Game over. Given the zeal with which she picked up a flame-thrower in the administration’s war with Israel, her allegiance is no longer in doubt.

By enthusiastically holding Israel to the same double standard that its enemies always do, she made her bones as a member of the Obama Family.

Worse, she told the world about it. Boasted about it, actually. As gang initiations go, it was a trophy moment.

So much for the “friend of Israel” pose she struck while seeking Jewish votes and money in her campaigns for the Senate and the White House.

In one sense, Clinton’s dressing down of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a return to her pre-Senate days. In 1999, as first lady, she stayed silent, then played kissy-face with Suha Arafat at a West Bank event where the terror leader’s wife accused Israel of gassing Palestinian women and children.

Running for the Senate and then representing New York, Clinton worked hard to overcome that mistake. She reassured voters that she understood the United States cannot simultaneously be an honest broker in the Mideast and Israel’s most reliable friend and ally. One must choose, and she chose, conveniently, to stand with the Jewish state against its hostile neighbors.

The neighbors are still hostile, but now so is Clinton. Her 43-minute tirade against Netanyahu — a private call that her office promptly disclosed to the media — was directed by the president himself. He apparently did not believe that Vice President Joe Biden’s harsh condemnation of a plan to build 1,600 apartments in East Jerusalem was sufficient, and so ordered his secretary of state into action.

In this case, obedience was not a virtue. The president was wrong, and she has magnified his mistake, turning an Israeli blunder into a full-scale crisis. The proof of the error is the strut of the usual suspects who always find Israel a useful scapegoat for all that’s wrong in the world.

There is a déjà vu feeling about the Obama White House, too. Once again, it has displayed a bad habit of abusing America’s friends while trying to mollify our adversaries. It’s tough love, without the love.

It was indeed stupid of Israel to embarrass Biden, who went to Jerusalem to deliver important and welcome news. His declaration that “the United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period” aimed to remove growing doubts about US policy, doubts that might still lead to an Israeli military strike.

Clinton and Obama created those doubts by suggesting we were preparing to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

Meanwhile, they kept pressing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, arguing that a peace deal would remove the issue from the jihad agenda and make it easier for Arab nations and Europe to get tougher on Iran.

The linkage makes no sense and has never sat well with Israelis, most of whom know that even so-called moderate Palestinians are not ready to accept Israel’s right to exist. Now Washington has proved that Israelis are not suffering national paranoia.

The phone call to Netanyahu and Clinton’s demands yesterday that he prove he is committed to peace confirm Israel’s worst fears. As commentators there are noting, Obama and Clinton don’t go ballistic and claim “insult” when Syria spurns US efforts and openly courts Iran, or when Palestinians celebrate as “martyrs” terrorists who kill Israeli civilians.

Of course, Israelis are familiar with the sting of a double standard. The only shock is that it’s coming from the president and secretary of state.

Tax pols get soda-popped

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I saw it as a sign of progress when 150 workers at soda-bottling plants confronted Gov. Paterson over his plan for a tax on sugary sodas. The workers told Paterson the tax could cost them their jobs.

“This would be an economic boon for New Jersey,” said Joseph Wojiechowski, president of Teamsters Local 812, suggesting the plants would move there to escape the hike.

He could be right. As such, the protest is a reminder that every tax has consequences for the economy and jobs.

Even defensible hikes, such as the sugar tax, which aims to reduce childhood obesity and help close the state budget gap, have to be seen for the pain as well as the hoped-for benefits.

For that view to be effective, more workers need to realize their interests are often tied to their employers’ and not to the advocates who push for ever-higher government spending and taxes. The enormous government appetite for cash means some of that tax money comes from workers’ pockets.

Part of the spending game is a con, with politicians finding it a safe bet to attack corporations, acting as though money from them is free. But that’s bull.

As any junior bean counter can tell you, companies don’t pay taxes. They just pass them along, either through higher prices on their products or through lower pay and benefits to their workers.

The pols know it. It’s time voters got wise, too.

Mike, be Zero hero

I’M up to speed on the latest delays at Ground Zero, except for one thing: How is it that none of this shameful scandal is Mayor Bloomberg’s responsibility?

His abdication started when Bloomy and then-Gov. George Pataki carved up Manhattan development. Pataki would handle The Pit and lower Manhattan, and the mayor would carry the ball on the far West Side of Midtown.

That was seven long years ago. Yet Bloomberg still seems to be missing in action, as though the stalemate on downtown reconstruction is somebody else’s problem.

It’s one thing to have a Teflon coating. It’s another to be invisible.

Come on, Mayor. Get in the game. It’s your job.

Sick leap of faith

As Obama’s health-care claims get more dramatic and Pelosi’s plan gets more mysterious, the de cision on how to vote actually gets easier. It’s a simple litmus test: Anyone who has total faith in government’s ability to make this monster legislation work as promised should support it. Ev erything else is detail.

PUNCHING-BAG PALIN

Rielle Hunter, the John Edwards “you’re so hot” hussy, finds the pictures she posed for “repulsive.” That’s what you call common ground.

Imagine if her Johnny had been elected president. America dodged a bullet with this creep. Yet in most mainstream media, Sarah Palin, who only ran for vice president after she was nominated, still gets hammered far more than he does. Why is that?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Piping-hot joke

You won’t be able to es cape the skirl of bagpipes today, so arm yourself with history as told by Malachy McCourt. The Irish, he says, gave the pipes to the Scots 400 years ago. And the Scots still don’t get the joke.